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100 Days, and no response from Ticketmaster

06/07/2012

100 days ago, we joined with our partners the National Consumers League and Consumer Action to call on Ticketmaster, Paciolan and Veritix – the nation’s three leading ticketing companies – to help us fight “bots,” abusive ticketing software used by unscrupulous ticket resellers to cut the line and cheat fans.

That all resale exchanges include in their Seller Terms of Service: A) an explicit prohibition against reselling tickets that have been obtained with bots; B) a requirement that resellers permit anti-bot audits by exchanges when the reseller posts for sale more than 30 tickets to an event within 24 hours of the public onsale; and C) a requirement that resellers cooperate with government inquiries of alleged bot purchases.

That we jointly request that the Federal Trade Commission and National Association of Attorneys General create a federal or multi-state task force to investigate the purchase of tickets using bots, and that we agree to voluntarily cooperate in that Task Force’s deliberations. (In fact, FFP has already asked the Tennessee Attorney General to conduct an investigation into bots.)

That we jointly promote and support anti-bot legislation in the states that do not already have legislation on the books, and that such legislation include authority and cooperation for multi-state investigations by the relevant enforcement agencies.

That we jointly promote the creation of an industry-wide confidential data service to measure bot usage.

We still haven’t received a response.

But starting today, our supporters are pushing back. They’re taking to Twitter and Facebook to ask Ticketmaster and its CEO, Nathan Hubbard, to help FFP, NCL and Consumer Action to stop the bots. In response, Ticketmaster said they’re leading the fight against bots! We think actions speak louder than words. After all, fans have the right to buy tickets to the shows and games we love – without having to compete with state-of-the-art technology designed to cheat us and drive up prices.

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